Blue Diamonds

Making a good start on that long list of items for Daughter No 2, she’d identified a couple of pairs of trousers she really really wanted, and had allocated fabric from the stash! The tracing was done and when she came home for a week, I decided to get making, but with conditions…

She helped me in my allotment in the mornings (vitamin D and excercise) and then in the afternoon, we would sew together. She’d also made a pile of summer clothes that came out of the loft that needed attention. So we had our week’s worth of work laid out!

Burda trousers 113 08/2017

The first pair of trousers is 113 from Burda 08/2017. The fabric chosen to make them up came from ( I think) Ditto Fabrics, a good few years ago now. Daughter No 2 is slightly pear shaped, narrow waist and broader hips. There is usually a 2 size difference, so I traced the equivalent of the 38, going by her hip easurement. It’s a petite pattern, so I lengthened it: 1cm in the crotch depth, 1.5cm between the hip and knee and another 2cm between the knee and the hem. That should make it the right length for an “average” height person. Then I toiled and made the fitting adjustments on her to get the waist perfect. This was especially needed as the waistband doesn’t sit on the natural waist. But one thing didn’t quite work out. The length!!! The photo in the magazine clearly shows the model’s ankles and bottom part of her leg below the hem of the trousers, that was not happening with ours! You would expect Burdastyle to photograph the petite garments on petite models, yes?? I think they have used their standard height tall people here, there’s no other way to get the length they have, because even on shortening the pattern again (except for the crotch depth adjustment), it still wasn’t as short as on the model in the picture. And at 1.76cm tall, you cannot call Daughter No2 “average” height…

In the end we kept the length as it was originally traced, and narrowed the waist to just below the size 34. I took a bit out of the centre back to accomodate her posture, scooped out the crotch line and changed the shape of the curve – also a posture adjustment, and took in the inside seam, front seam by 1cm and back seam by 2, all tapering back to normal by the knee. I also added pockets! You need pocketses, so I drew up a pattern for inseam pockets, nice deep ones that ones phone won’t fall out of…

Inseam pocketses for the win!

I really love the finished pants, the colour of the fabric is turquoise with very dark blue diamond shapes, it looks black, but it’s not! I like that Daughter No 2 is confident to change it up with different shoes, and tops. I hope they get lots of wear this summer! That was a May Burda Challenge project, but as it’s only been blogged now in June, I’m calling it for June instead!

Yeah, I usualy have to take out 6cm for me, so I thougth these would be fine.. Burda really should use the right size and shape models for their clothes. It took them ages to put proper plus sizes in the plus size garments, so who knows how long it’ll take for short models to be used too! There isn’t as much of a fuss about height as there is about curvyness/shape.

I love these pants … didn’t want to try to make them as I need a tall pattern rather than petite but based on you comment I think I’ll give it a go, thanks! Going back to the magazine, I now notice that this model is doing all patterns in this collection: petite, regular and tall!!!! how weird is that …:-(